Latour's shooter fires his Desert Eagle, wounding someone in the shoulder. A driver fails to brake at a pedestrian crossing, hitting the old man walking across it. I drop a barbell and break several bones in my foot. We often cause harm with artefacts by using them to undertake actions, whether intentional or not, that are harmful. Instrumental relations are a precursor to such harms done with technology. To enter an instrumental relation with a technology is to act with it, and thus, harms done with technology presuppose actions. To understand instrumental relations, we therefore need to understand what actions are. We need to understand what they are comprised of and what shape their intentional structure takes.

This ‘intentional structure’ consists of a concatenation of relata. It includes the links between an actor's intentions, the tools they use, the purpose behind their actions, their effects and the harms that follow. Examining this intentional structure is important for several reasons. First, it helps us break away from unhelpful and misleading dichotomies between intentional and unintentional harms. Many harms cannot be straightforwardly classified as intentional or unintentional. Often, they are ‘middling actions’ (Mele, 2012) that fall somewhere between. ‘Middling actions’ complicate moral responsibility (Mele and Sverdlik, 1996) and the role of intention in criminal liability (see Duff, 1990). They challenge legal and ethical frameworks that rely on clear- cut distinctions between deliberate wrongdoing and mere accident.

Second, examining this intentional structure helps us pinpoint how an artefact contributes to an act's harmfulness. It enables us to identify whether a harm results from the nature of the end we are pursuing or the means through which we are pursuing it (Wood et al, 2025). Technologies can, as we’ve seen, infuse harm into the pursuit of otherwise benign ends.